EverQuest

Me + Merc = Dead Dragon I’ve been dancing around the whole EverQuest 2 mercenary thing for awhile. I was killing things solo fine – MORE than fine – and the thought of hiring an NPC to take half the dropped coin and half the experience for something I could do myself… wasn’t a fan. Not at all. I was working on completing the deity quest line for Mithanial Marr, though, and the game wanted me to go into the Estate of Unrest, a challenging zone for level 70 groups, and kill a named. I’d already peeked into some Bonemire dungeons, and things had not gone well for me, solo. ...

Halfling Beastlord Those who follow me on Google+ have been hearing about my problems with the Age of Discovery. It’s the expansion that brought mercenaries and beastlords to the game, and is the one expansion not included in the forthcoming expansion, Chains of Eternity. I went ahead and bought Chains of Eternity assuming I would get all previous expansions that I’d missed (Velious, etc), but, wrong. I’d get all previous expansions except Age of Discovery. ...

Plants vs Zombies. I enjoyed the Guild Wars 2 Halloween celebration, what I saw of it. I might as well have just stayed hidden at the side of the fight and just watched, because I was too low level to contribute (even though artificially leveled to 80 for the event). Folks were reminiscing about the Halloween celebrations in GW1 and EQ2 and I started thinking, hey, I really liked the Halloween celebrations in EQ2, too… why am I not over there doing them? ...

My lizard, Leapster When you think about it, Fae are just the right size to be eaten in one gulp by the EverQuest 2 jumping lizard mounts. I’m too terrified to dismount, and so I leap from place to place within Lesser Faydark, death from above for the invader Tier’Dal who nonetheless managed to drag me from my mount last night and slaughter me. Experience is slow in the Lesser Fay. Every EQ2 story I read tells of people hitting 60, 70, 85 before they realize it, in just a couple days, but I’ve been working on this zone for months, with breaks to do quests and some seasonal events. Clearly, this hasn’t been my main game. ...

EQ Emulator server list EQ Emulator now works with versions of EverQuest I actually have now! So anyway I still have some configuring to do before I can regress back to 1999. And I’m playing it through my LAN to where the files are stored on my Linux server because I had some crazy idea that I could play it in Wine. That wasn’t happening. More later. Sleep now.

New Freeport I have a friend who is so into Rift. “You have to come back!” he said. “Ember Isles is amazing; the new warfront is awesome; the instant adventures are great!” I want to come back and see all this! Then he started playing SWTOR. I really still want to come back. Problem is when I log in, I have to figure out all the new stuff; seems the soul trees change every time. I have to remember how to solo and how to group. I guess the penalties for getting it wrong aren’t that high, and the new instant adventure thing could help get my feet wet quickly. I should check it out. ...

Rapture Raptor! I do WANT to play Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic. I WILL play it. Just… not right now. I’m not in a good place with MMOs at the moment. See, I’ve just spent a month playing Skyrim, and it’s left quite an impression. I just don’t know if I can play a tightly scripted MMO when I’ve just spent 130 hours exploring a world. There’s just too much hype around the game right now. The hype makes it impossible for me to consider the title calmly, because, being the contrarian I am, I’d be inclined to hate it. It can’t possibly live up to its hype, but why should that matter? Someday I’ll sit down and watch all the Star Wars movies, or maybe play KotOR again, and then I know I’ll want to play SWTOR. Or someone will want to form a static group – because it doesn’t even matter what game it is, meeting once a week for a static group is reason enough to play anything. My time in DDO proves that. ...

All anyone is talking about these days is Winds of Pandaria. I desperately want to join in, but how? I don’t play WoW any more. I’m feeling a little left out. But hey, why let that stop me. I may not play WoW much any more, but I have played another game that was desperately trying to attract new players while keeping old ones – EverQuest. A game that is still going strong. At this stage in its life, where WoW finds itself today, EQ added a race of dragon people, a whole new accelerated leveling path. Later came mercenaries that allowed almost any class to easily solo. All this kind of stuff. ...

Ophiga and friend The big news yesterday was the dropping of the Press NDA for Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic. I read all the press reviews I could find; I’ll point to some of those later on, but almost all of them credited the storyline for pulling them deeper into the game. The game mechanics may be old hat, and the standard roles, dungeons and raids are present, but the story, by all accounts, is worth the price of admission. ...

For all those old EverQuesties who remember the glory of Freeport before it was ruined and destroyed in the Prophecy of Ro expansion, Utenan1 has recreated West and North Freeport in Minecraft. They are so dead-on that even more than a decade in, I could still find my way around blindfolded. (Can anyone claim that with new Freeport?) West Freeport North Freeport